Plan for Brian Ramage
by Brian Ramage · 06/23/2005 (6:22 pm) · 30 comments
TSE milestone 2 is complete, and milestone 3 is well underway, so I thought
it would be a good time to share my thoughts on where we're going with it.
The main goal of MS3 is to tighten up the engine for more general consumption.
We want to fix some of the more annoying bugs and streamline some areas so
working with the materials is easier. We'd also like to increase performance,
particularly on nVIDIA FX cards.
Here are some of the major improvements planned:
- Get FSAA fully working
- .DDS support and more DXT compression options
- Fix skinning code with interpolated tangent space vectors
- Get an Atlas terrain editor working
- Add a texture / material flush so artists don't need to reload TSE to tweak materials
- Pre-load materials/shaders/other resources on level load
- Better .dif warnings if they are incorrect version
- Material enhancements
- Alpha test
- Parallax mapping
- More blend operations for cubemaps
- More procedural shader options
- Better control over specular colors
- ... much more
In addition, I've got an update of Materials coming up next week that has:
- client side Materials / ShaderData / CubemapData
- auto loading of materials.cs from subdirectories - so they can live with the data
- got rid of addMaterialMapping() calls - the mapping is done in the Material itself now
- full path names of textures are no longer needed
I'll explain these improvements in greater detail when the updates go live.
Figuring a timeline for MS3 is tough at this point as we have a LOT going on behind the
scenes right now. Josh should be releasing a "bounty" list for MS3 tasks that we'd pay
to get done, so we're hoping that can speed the development a bit. We've also got the
possibility of GG co-founder Tim Gift making a guest star appearance for MS3. He might
break out some goodies (OpenGL anyone?).
About the author
#22
06/24/2005 (9:43 pm)
It just keeps getting better and better =)
#23
06/25/2005 (11:13 am)
i am totally new to game programming... so plz show me the easiest path to start.
#24
No promises on OpenGL, but cross your fingers ;)
@Martin - I'm still thinking of a good clean way to do that. Might take a shot at it when we hit the texture / material flush feature.
06/25/2005 (3:49 pm)
Thanks for all the comments guys.No promises on OpenGL, but cross your fingers ;)
@Martin - I'm still thinking of a good clean way to do that. Might take a shot at it when we hit the texture / material flush feature.
#25
06/26/2005 (1:17 am)
*Ahem*, Pat will also be guest starring on this (and future) edition(s) of TSE, reprising his usual role of bringing TSE to the console realm. This time it's with the delicious XBox 360.
#27
On another note, I think MSAA + Anisotropic Filtering is much more useful than FSAA (aka 'SuperSampling' right?)
Mostly because it has less of a performance hit. Given, people probably want the power of choosing between both.
MSAA also has no impact on textures, leaving that up to Anisotropic filtering.
07/05/2005 (7:11 pm)
That Bounty list out yet? Is it just for TsE?On another note, I think MSAA + Anisotropic Filtering is much more useful than FSAA (aka 'SuperSampling' right?)
Mostly because it has less of a performance hit. Given, people probably want the power of choosing between both.
MSAA also has no impact on textures, leaving that up to Anisotropic filtering.
#28
But I can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of this information.
That source may also have elluded to the fact that it is not ready yet.
07/07/2005 (7:32 am)
According to a secret source on irc... Maybe his nick was Galdor... Elluded that the bounty list would be for more then just TSE. But I can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of this information.
That source may also have elluded to the fact that it is not ready yet.
#29
12/29/2005 (6:58 am)
Great.. only it's posted half a year ago. Any idea on the release date/month?
#30
How would someone assign sounds to materials ? ...all attempts after 4 hours of web searching have failed.
Docs Docs Docs...explain explain explain
06/23/2007 (9:04 pm)
""- got rid of addMaterialMapping() calls - the mapping is done in the Material itself now""How would someone assign sounds to materials ? ...all attempts after 4 hours of web searching have failed.
Docs Docs Docs...explain explain explain
Torque Owner Weston Tracy
I'll be throwing a texture flush party when this is implemented, if anyone is interested... lots of drinkin' and flushin'